Now generally having this reserved space is not a bad thing, however the problem is that as drives grow larger, the amount of wasted space becomes larger than some of the smaller PS3's entire hard drives! Clearly that much isn't needed to prevent fragmentation.

This is why when you first install that shiny new 1.5TB hard drive you will see that not only is it only actually 1.36 TB because hard drive manufacturers really love counting in base 10, but you also lose another 111.4 GB. This is to reduce fragmentation and also prevent the drive from completely filling up, possibly freezing the computer.īy default, UFS2 reserves 8% of any drive's free space, in this case meaning it can't be used by the PS3 for installing games. Like other *nix file systems such as Ext2/3/4, UFS2 can reserve part of the drive's space to only be used by the system or the root user. While external drives used with the PS3 are all FAT32 formatted (or NTFS if you have CFW), the GameOS partition on the internal hard drive is formatted using the UFS2 filesystem with a layer of encryption on top. I believe the pros outweigh the cons though, and have been using this now without issue on my personal PS3 with a 1.5TB drive for a few days now, installing tons of games without a hitch. This guide will explain how to reclaim that wasted space by manually modifying the metadata of the UFS2 formatted GameOS partition using Linux, as well as the potential cons (primarily performance, though I haven't experienced any performance issues yet myself). Turns out not only is it possible, but it's relatively easy thanks to some existing tools created by the community.

From my searching online, I don't believe anyone has ever successfully unlocked that wasted space, so I decided to give it a shot. By default, even on custom firmware, the PS3 reserves 8% of your total internal hard drive space.

Replace custom firmware ps3 hdd